Monday, June 05, 2017

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. —
Registration is underway for the 21st annual Expanding Your Horizons in Math and Science
at MTSU, and middle school and
high school girls should act early to secure their place.

Expanding Your Horizons, or EYH, will be held from 8 a.m. to
3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 28, on campus.
The registration fee is $20. The deadline to register is Friday, Sept. 15, or
when maximum capacity has been reached.

EYH helps girls and young women investigate science and
mathematics careers, talk with women in math and science, attend a science and
math workshop with their peers, participate in hands-on activities and meet
girls interested in math and science.

EYH at MTSU is available for girls in middle school (grades
5 to 8) and high school (grades 9 to 12). Up to 250 middle school girls and up
to 100 high school girls are welcome to attend the event. Lunch is included in
the registration fee.

Kelly
Holley-Bockelmann, an associate professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt
University in Nashville, will be the keynote speaker.

As a first-generation college graduate within a family that
sometimes lived below the poverty level, Holley-Bockelmann has a deep interest
in broadening the participation of women, minorities and first-generation
college students in science.

She is co-director of the Fisk-to-Vanderbilt
Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program that is designed to mentor a diverse group of
graduate students to develop the skills needed to succeed as a doctoral
scientist.

Holley-Bockelmann joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2007. She
earned her bachelor’s degree in physics at Montana State University and
doctorate in astronomy in 1999 at the University of Michigan. She performed
postdoctoral work at Case Western Reserve University and the University of
Massachusetts.

In
2004, she joined the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics at Pennsylvania
State University, where she became a big fan of gravitational waves and
attended many talks on loop quantum gravity. Her main interests are in
computational galaxy dynamics, various black holes and gravitational waves.

Holley-Bockelmann
is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career
Development (CAREER) award, she is a Vanderbilt Chancellor Faculty Fellow and
NASA has supported her work. Her research on growing supermassive black holes
and rogue black holes has been featured in many online and print media outlets.